Thursday, June 12, 2008

Baby Blue Jay

Today when Peter and I got home from work, there was a baby blue jay on our porch step. We walked up really close to it and it didn't fly away so we became concerned. As we knelt down to see if the bird was injured, it began squaking and hobbly away. We felt so bad for the poor bird and thought maybe something was wrong with his wing. Then we discovered another baby blue jay laying dead under one of our trees. I looked around and spotted a nest. We figured that they either fell out or the nest blew over or something because they weren't able to fly yet. As the first baby blue jay is hobbling away, we spot a third baby blue jay in the driveway. When both of them get to squaking, the mommy blue jay came, also squaking. Before we knew it, there were about a half dozen blue jays as well as 2 robins and 1 cardinal in our front yard haha. It was a really neat scene the played out, but we felt bad because the baby blue jays kept getting lost from their mother when they blended in with the gravel in the driveway. Eventually, both of the baby bird that were alive and the mother made it across the road and into a neighbor's shrubs.

If you look closely, you can see the mommy blue jay on one of the wires in this picture. I tried capturing a picture when all the birds were flying around, but it was too hard with the sun and ducking from getting dive-bombed.

One of the baby blue jays that's lost in the driveay. It basically looks like a darker gray rock in this picture. They didn't have too much blue on them yet since they were so little.

Here's when Peter was trying to get the baby bird in the driveway to make noise so that the mother would hear it and find it. He had to be careful though because blue jays are very aggressive birds and would fly right towards us on the porch. I was the lookout and when I spotted some in the pine tree near the car, he made a run for it haha.

Here's the bird in the weird tree by our house that has horizontal branches. This is where the nest was.

On last silhouette shot of one of the big blue jays.

Here's a brief video of when the first 4-5 blue jays arrived. They were all in this pine tree and dove out of it looking for the baby that had made its way to the side of the car.

Good luck to the birds...we have lots of outside cats in our neighborhood so not sure how they'll make out.